Backups & restore — Cheat Sheet

Your sites are backed up automatically — nothing to set up. This page is the quick primer: what's protecting your site right now, how to take a snapshot you can actually restore from, how to get your own data out, and how to pull an offsite copy back down. Everything here links to the full story.

What's protecting your site, in 30 seconds

Nightly database dumps — every site's database is dumped on the server each night and kept 14 days by default. → Restoring with mybackup
A safety copy before anything destructive — a Restore snapshots the current site first, and offsite restores land in a staging folder, so you can't lose what you have now. → Backing up and restoring in the UI
Manual snapshots, on demand — the panel's Backup and Restore tasks, whenever you want one. → same page
Encrypted offsite backups — copies pushed to your own cloud storage, if your host has switched them on. → Restoring with mybackup

Take a snapshot you can actually restore from

The single most useful move on this page — and the one people get wrong. Run the panel's Backup task, but change Backup Mode first: the form opens on "Classic single file mysqldump only", which saves the database only and cannot be restored. Pick "Site files with classic mysqldump DB" instead — that is the one snapshot the Restore task can rebuild a whole site from.

→ Backing up and restoring in the UI

Roll a site back

Run the panel's Restore task and pick a backup. Before it changes anything, BOA takes a fresh snapshot of the site as it is right now — labelled "Generated before being restored to a previous version" — so a restore can never cost you your current state.

→ Backing up and restoring in the UI

Export your site yourself — no ticket

From your site's limited shell (oN.ftp), pull the database out in one line, or copy the whole site directory home:

BASH

ssh [email protected] 'drush @example.com sql-dump' > dump.sql
rsync -avzuL [email protected]:clients/myclient/example.com ./

Use drush11 and the hyphenated alias (@sub-example.com) on Drupal 8+. The -L on rsync is not optional — without it you copy dead symlinks instead of your files.

→ Exporting your site · Shell & SFTP access

Pull an offsite backup back down (host-enabled)

If your host has encrypted offsite backups switched on, fetch one from your own oN.ftp shell. This is restore-only — there is no backup verb, because the offsite copies are made for you automatically:

BASH

mybackup restore <SERVICE> [RESTORE_PATH] [RESTORE_TIME]

The job is queued, you're emailed when it finishes (if your account has an email address on file), and everything lands in ~/static/restores/ — it never overwrites your live files. Keep your encryption passphrase safe: a lost one can't be reset, and the offsite copies can't be opened without it.

→ Restoring with mybackup

Trim retention to free up quota

The nightly dumps count against your disk quota. Shorten how many days are kept with a one-line control file — the whole number is days to keep:

BASH

echo 7 > ~/static/control/dBackupCycle.info

An empty or missing file means the default 14; a non-number value skips the cleanup rather than deleting anything. → Restoring with mybackup

The files and dials most people touch

File / setting	What it controls	Default
`~/static/control/dBackupCycle.info`	Days of nightly DB dumps kept before pruning	`14`
Panel Backup Mode (Backup task)	Which snapshot you get — pick "Site files with classic mysqldump DB" to restore	(opens on DB-only)
`~/static/control/remote_backups/credentials/<service>.txt`	Switches on encrypted offsite backups for one provider	(none)
`~/static/control/MyQuick.info`	Fast per-table dumps — the archive then has no single `database.sql`	(on by default; opt out via `MyClassic.info`)

The full set lives on the backup pages: the 3 panel Backup Modes, the 11 cloud-storage services mybackup understands, and the 4 offsite fine-tune files (include.txt, exclude.txt, and their *_regexp.txt pair). See Backups on your sites and the control-files reference.

If something's weird

"Restore won't take my backup." The backup was made in the default DB-only mode → take a new one in "Site files with classic mysqldump DB" mode; why the default can't restore.
The archive has no database.sql. Fast per-table dumps were used → rebuild from a classic-mode Backup, or export with drush @site sql-dump; exporting your site.
Not sure the nightly or offsite schedule is firing? That's a host-side check → start here, or ask your host.

Going deeper

The whole topic, in depth: Backups on your sites — the UI tasks, mybackup and quotas, how your files are stored, and exporting everything.
Moving a site instead of restoring one: Cloning & migrating · Importing a site.
The backup engine and retention internals (for operators): Backups internals · Retention · multiback operations.